In this discussion thread, I was moved by the statement of Kimmo Virtanen (On Fri, Oct 11, 2024) :
"When I was deciding who to vote for, I used edit count as a proxy for Wikimedia experience and excluded most of non-US/Europe candidates because their edit counts were too low." The cumulative numbers of edits is something very important in Wikipedia, and it shows that it determines the social weight in the movement and thus, the chance to be elected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits But I'm not sure the movement can only be represented by high level editors. This system prevents many valuable editors and candidates from 'punching at its weight' in the different elections of the movement. So wouldn't it be a good thing to create something like a "Weight class" (as it exists for example in boxing) for the elections of the Movement where people could candidate and vote in different categories ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_class_(boxing) Creating different classes of voting could allow people to express and discuss concerns which are specific to their categories and vote in their polling division for people who represent them. This would give a chance to more skilled people to be elected. This categorization could also enrich a future Global Council with more various profiles and concerns. waltercolor as a modest editor ________________________________ De : Steven Walling <[email protected]> Envoyé : dimanche 20 octobre 2024 22:18 À : Wikimedia Mailing List <[email protected]> Objet : [Wikimedia-l] Re: Preliminary results of the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 11:51 AM Matej Grochal <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Dear all interesting idea with the regional primaries but I am not sure it is the right way. It seems that having more rounds would alienate voters more than draw them in. We keep having so many elections. Remember, there would have to be elections for the electoral committee that would coordinate the primaries in the regions in addition to a central/global election committee. And there would have to be a committee to decide how those primaries will be run and what the distribution of the regional seats will be and so on. But then it is still probably easier and fairer than trying to coordinate who will be _the_ candidate that all of one region should vote for. And more transparent. Not having done any kind of research on this, my hunch is that a big factor in this election was name recognition. There are tons of people who do good work and lead well but are just not easily recognized "household names" for community members on a global scale, they might be recognized within their region. Voters should try to get to know the candidates a bit more, invest an hour and listen to their statements, read about their ideas and accomplishments. The session at Wikimania was quite useful for this purpose. Be well! Matej More rounds is significantly more work to coordinate and participate in, you're 100% right Matej. It's well known that primaries tend to draw fewer voters than general elections. It's a big drawback. Another alternative would be to iterate on the idea of dedicated Board seats to represent some groups of stakeholders. One of the main issues with both the current system and the old one (which lumped together all of the chapter / affiliate seats in one global block) is that *both* systems ended up just biasing toward candidates from North America or Europe. If the Board seats allocated to community-elected seats were more granular with dedicated regional seats—similar to how legislative bodies for a city or state get broken down into geographic districts—that could help correct for it, while being realistic about the biases inherent to effectively participating in the Board or other movement bodies (like English fluency). On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 8:11 PM Steven Walling <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 1:21 AM Bobby Shabangu <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Very interesting conversations here! And indeed I agree with Florence. There really needs to be serious voter education especially in global South Communities, focusing on how the transferable voting system works. I went to these elections very worried about the same thing, raising it sharply during our candidate onboarding session. I was disappointed during WikiIndaba conference to hear a number of the conference participants wishing me well with the elections adding that they only voted for me! Anyway, we live to fight another day, thanks to everyone who voted for me - placing me as their top 4 candidate in their vote. And congrats once again to the elected candidate. Best regards, Bobby Shabangu Rather than just thinking about how to teach voters how to vote, we should consider ways to adjust the process to make it more intuitive to understand. We have the opportunity to do this as part of the Board governance conversation that is collecting feedback now I think? The data is clear that ranking this many candidates is overly complex and many voters won’t do it. The data also reflect real-world confusion in political elections implementing ranked choice voting. The eligibility requirements round did a good job of eliminating a few candidates that would likely not have performed well. We really need to think about ways to decrease the number of candidates to a more reasonable number if we want to increase voter participation. For instance, we could consider regional primaries where we specifically ask voters from a given set of wikis and organizations to nominate 1-2 Board candidates from their combined geographic + language region. It wouldn’t be perfect but with predefined voter participation thresholds and more targeted campaigns, it could make election outreach more effective at driving proportionally greater voting. This kind of equity is why the Global Council idea was brought forth, but we could achieve a similar outcome without creating an entirely new governance body. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/QOAE3G2HJWSXQKR4ML53ZS2FC3JQXQIW/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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